John Harris

Cancel the Apocalypse by Andrew Simms – review

Thursday, February 28th, 2013

An economy based on renewable energy, zero growth and a shorter working week might sound outrageous, but such ideas are hardly new

Back in the days when he had the gleam of youthful promise, David Cameron affected to be interested in green politics, and something called “general well-being”. Ed Miliband was a somewhat evangelical secretary of state for energy and climate change, whose first speech as Labour leader examined the notion of “life beyond the bottom line”. But the long aftermath of the economic crash looks to have left precious little room for such ideas, instead pointing up the irony that one of the consequences of the financial crisis has been the squashing of any convincing conversation about everything that caused it, and what it actually means.

Perhaps this is down to the incremental, drily pragmatic nature of democratic politics; perhaps it’s just reflective of capitalism being capitalism, so that anything hostile to its interests is quickly neutralised. Whichever it is, while inequality is widening, glaciers are still melting and what passes for British debate about it seems laughable. On a bad day, it can seem as if the entirety of politics now rotates around a quarterly event: the release of the provisional figure for economic growth, or the lack of it.

The economist, campaigner and author Andrew Simms works in a rather different universe, accessible via the offices of the New Economics Foundation. He is most renowned for Tescopoly, his book about the rise of the titular retail giant, and his subsequent invention of the concept of ”clone towns”. But Cancel the Apocalypse is much more ambitious: a treatise on why the human race cannot go on as it is, and what we might be able to do by way of an alternative. In addressing what the political-economic vernacular calls sustainability, it takes in the banking system, energy generation, the global air-travel business, meat-eating and more – along with such tangential reference points as the psychedelic rock band Hawkwind, Kurt Vonnegut’s Galapagos and Doris Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor. It is a breathless, quotation-packed work, light years from anything to do with orthodox politics, which suggests someone unpacking the entire contents of their head: it’s probably about 100 pages too long, and best read at the rate of a chapter every few days.

Yet Simms’s talent for casting gigantic issues in pleasingly human terms is clear, and proved by his evocation of the five or so days in 2010 when the ash from an Icelandic volcano shut down European airspace. He describes staring into the unblemished blue from Kew Gardens, and realising what was afoot: “Flying was something we thought we couldn’t live without, [but] the world did not come to a standstill.” He is also keen to push his arguments into new territories, as evidenced by what turns out to be the book’s unexpected highlight: a chapter on advertising and PR, and the extent to which they work as the free market’s multicoloured telescreen. And he has facts galore. The county of Cornwall alone, he says, has to dispose of 4,000 tonnes of junk mail every year – “500 dustcarts’ worth, costing them around £700,000″. If you consider left-field the idea of slowing down the capitalist machine via a ban on billboard advertising, it’s worth bearing in mind that it has already been done in Vermont, Maine, Hawaii and Alaska.

No one will agree with every word. For my own part, I was maddened by Simms’s complete hostility to nuclear power. A lot of what he writes is open to an obvious enough criticism: that his arguments should probably be addressed at China, India and Brazil rather than a small and increasingly insignificant corner of northern Europe. But there is a joy in reading someone setting out the case for such unmentionables as a 21-hour working week and an economy that runs wholly on renewables. Moreover, when you have set the book down and pondered its essential message, you are left with an entire mindset rather than specific proposals.

Consume less, he says. Be sceptical about new technology. Slow down. And do not fall for the modern political class’s post-Blair belief that history is bunk, and to draw on the past is to be a hopeless throwback: it is only a comparative blink since the second world war found millions of people reshaping their lives in the cause of a common endeavour, and the same thing could yet happen again.

And then there is the fetish of growth, or rather growth-ism. As Simms points out, the idea that economies necessarily have their limits was being voiced when capitalism was still young: in 1848, John Stuart Mill argued that “a stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement”. A century and a half later, Adair Turner, a former director of the CBI, told Simms that if anyone thinks “the most important objective of public policy is to get growth from 1.9 per cent to 2 per cent and even better 2.1 per cent”, they’re worshipping a “false god”, and ”extra growth does not automatically translate into extra human welfare and happiness”.

These are pretty ordinary thoughts, but ones that the dull noise coming from Westminster renders almost exotic – and essential.

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Cancel the Apocalypse by Andrew Simms – review

Thursday, February 28th, 2013

An economy based on renewable energy, zero growth and a shorter working week might sound outrageous, but such ideas are hardly new

Back in the days when he had the gleam of youthful promise, David Cameron affected to be interested in green politics, and something called “general well-being”. Ed Miliband was a somewhat evangelical secretary of state for energy and climate change, whose first speech as Labour leader examined the notion of “life beyond the bottom line”. But the long aftermath of the economic crash looks to have left precious little room for such ideas, instead pointing up the irony that one of the consequences of the financial crisis has been the squashing of any convincing conversation about everything that caused it, and what it actually means.

Perhaps this is down to the incremental, drily pragmatic nature of democratic politics; perhaps it’s just reflective of capitalism being capitalism, so that anything hostile to its interests is quickly neutralised. Whichever it is, while inequality is widening, glaciers are still melting and what passes for British debate about it seems laughable. On a bad day, it can seem as if the entirety of politics now rotates around a quarterly event: the release of the provisional figure for economic growth, or the lack of it.

The economist, campaigner and author Andrew Simms works in a rather different universe, accessible via the offices of the New Economics Foundation. He is most renowned for Tescopoly, his book about the rise of the titular retail giant, and his subsequent invention of the concept of ”clone towns”. But Cancel the Apocalypse is much more ambitious: a treatise on why the human race cannot go on as it is, and what we might be able to do by way of an alternative. In addressing what the political-economic vernacular calls sustainability, it takes in the banking system, energy generation, the global air-travel business, meat-eating and more – along with such tangential reference points as the psychedelic rock band Hawkwind, Kurt Vonnegut’s Galapagos and Doris Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor. It is a breathless, quotation-packed work, light years from anything to do with orthodox politics, which suggests someone unpacking the entire contents of their head: it’s probably about 100 pages too long, and best read at the rate of a chapter every few days.

Yet Simms’s talent for casting gigantic issues in pleasingly human terms is clear, and proved by his evocation of the five or so days in 2010 when the ash from an Icelandic volcano shut down European airspace. He describes staring into the unblemished blue from Kew Gardens, and realising what was afoot: “Flying was something we thought we couldn’t live without, [but] the world did not come to a standstill.” He is also keen to push his arguments into new territories, as evidenced by what turns out to be the book’s unexpected highlight: a chapter on advertising and PR, and the extent to which they work as the free market’s multicoloured telescreen. And he has facts galore. The county of Cornwall alone, he says, has to dispose of 4,000 tonnes of junk mail every year – “500 dustcarts’ worth, costing them around £700,000″. If you consider left-field the idea of slowing down the capitalist machine via a ban on billboard advertising, it’s worth bearing in mind that it has already been done in Vermont, Maine, Hawaii and Alaska.

No one will agree with every word. For my own part, I was maddened by Simms’s complete hostility to nuclear power. A lot of what he writes is open to an obvious enough criticism: that his arguments should probably be addressed at China, India and Brazil rather than a small and increasingly insignificant corner of northern Europe. But there is a joy in reading someone setting out the case for such unmentionables as a 21-hour working week and an economy that runs wholly on renewables. Moreover, when you have set the book down and pondered its essential message, you are left with an entire mindset rather than specific proposals.

Consume less, he says. Be sceptical about new technology. Slow down. And do not fall for the modern political class’s post-Blair belief that history is bunk, and to draw on the past is to be a hopeless throwback: it is only a comparative blink since the second world war found millions of people reshaping their lives in the cause of a common endeavour, and the same thing could yet happen again.

And then there is the fetish of growth, or rather growth-ism. As Simms points out, the idea that economies necessarily have their limits was being voiced when capitalism was still young: in 1848, John Stuart Mill argued that “a stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement”. A century and a half later, Adair Turner, a former director of the CBI, told Simms that if anyone thinks “the most important objective of public policy is to get growth from 1.9 per cent to 2 per cent and even better 2.1 per cent”, they’re worshipping a “false god”, and ”extra growth does not automatically translate into extra human welfare and happiness”.

These are pretty ordinary thoughts, but ones that the dull noise coming from Westminster renders almost exotic – and essential.

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Eastleigh welcomes the Hamiltons to town

Wednesday, February 27th, 2013

Disgraced former Tory minister Neil Hamilton and his ‘lovely’ wife Christine spent the day campaigning on behalf of Ukip

For Jenny Martin, a 65-year-old resident of the West End area of Eastleigh, a quiet weekday afternoon has just taken a rather strange turn. A small scrum of photographers has gathered at the end of her drive, and her doorbell has just been rung by the former Conservative minister Neil Hamilton, here for the day with his wife, Christine.

To some people, the Hamiltons may still be a byword for corruption and disgrace. But for the UK Independence party, they are today’s star turn: he dressed in a deerstalker hat and country-gent green jacket, she in blue jeans and red suede loafers. Ukip members and campaigners since 2011 (the male half of the partnership also serves on the party’s national executive committee), they talk of political correctness, and David Cameron’s recent policy shifts on Europe – and they have the benefit of being instantly recognisable, to some people at least.

“I know who you are,” says Mrs Martin slowly moving her eyes from husband to wife. “And I know who you are.” Which party she might vote for, though, remains a mystery: she says she’s made up her mind, and is keeping it to herself. But what she later tells me about her visitors suggests she is at least sympathetic to their cause: “I think Christine’s a lovely lady, I really do.”

With accusations about the Lib Dems’ Lord Rennard once again putting alleged political scandal in the headlines, sending these two out might seem an odd move. But Ukip’s campaigners have the straight-backed confidence of people who know what they’re doing. 10 days ago, William Hill put their chances of winning at 25-1; now, they’re down to 8-1, with some bookmakers narrowing the numbers even further. One thing is just about certain: Ukip will finish well ahead of the newly “one nation” Labour party, whose deep angst about the south of England looks likely to be deepened by the Eastleigh result.

Some of this is down to Ukip’s candidate, Diane James: a smart, apparently unflappable operator who you might easily mistake for an A-list Tory candidate, something not helped by the gauche, accident-prone reputation of the Conservatives’ Maria Hutchings. A lot of the party’s appeal is probably traceable to their simple, bullet-point platform – and in particular, their endlessly-reiterated opposition to”open-door immigration”. There is also a sense of the party bonding with voters thanks to its line on “saving manufacturing jobs in key industries”, which chimes with local anger about the end of production at Ford’s nearby Southampton works, the British home of the iconic Transit van.

Even if the Ukip insurgency is by far the most interesting aspect of the Eastleigh story, the prize remains set to go to one of the coalition parties, and recent polling suggests that the result could go either way. If the Lib Dems hold on to the seat, their fear about possible wipeout in 2015 will abate, and Nick Clegg will affect to be a man renewed and emboldened – while the Tories’ current angst will deepen.

If the Tories snatch it, rumblings of disaffection about David Cameron will die down, and it will be his coalition partners who may go into a tailspin. For both parties, the prospect of the Eastleigh result marking a fresh start is complicated by a tangle of different irritants: for the Lib Dems, the ongoing Rennard affair; for the Tories, the Ukip factor (the idea that Cameron’s big Europe speech might have put them back in their box now looks fanciful, to say the least); and for both, the parlous state of the economy, something highlighted by the pinched, rather forlorn atmosphere of Eastleigh’s town centre.

They – and Labour – should also worry about a feeling that can be picked up all over this constituency: that the tetchy disconnection from politics that went nuclear with the expenses crisis, was probably perpetuated by the very public fall of Chris Huhne, and shows no signs of going away, least of all round here.

Indeed, this well-funded, frantic contest may have made things even worse. In two days I spend in Eastleigh, every local person I speak to complains of mountains of leaflets, intrusive cold-calling, and bumptious Westminster types crowding their streets. The result is a weird kind of dissonance: blogs and op-ed pieces written in London salivate over “the most important byelection in 30 years” and claim – with some justification – that its outcome will have profound consequences for the two coalition parties, while most locals view it all with a sullen detachment. Many will vote, but probably out of duty rather than any obvious enthusiasm. All told, the contest has the air of one of those 70s football matches played out in ankle-deep mud and horizontal rain: a test not of flair or skill, but persistence, brute strength, and the avoidance of accident.

“It’s all just overkill,” says David Wentworth, a 46-year-old storeman who works for a local electrical company, and talks to me outside Eastleigh’s branch of Sainsbury’s. He voted for the Lib Dems in 2010, but says that the Huhne story is likely to push him elsewhere. “He should have admitted to what he did much earlier,” he says. “These people are meant to be looked up to, aren’t they? But it just seems like one more thing, like expenses and all that.” He says he is aware of the Rennard story, but that if any of it is true, it will merely confirm his scepticism about politics, rather than telling him anything new. And he’s seriously considering voting for Ukip, thanks partly to their emphasis on “trying to stop so many people coming into the country”. “It’s not being racial or anything like that,” he says, “it’s to do with everything being so overstretched.”

Round the corner is the Lib Dems’ campaign HQ, where much of the local mountain of leaflets originates. Stepping inside, what I’m confronted with is not testament to organisational ability, but a collective drive to prove that the party is still alive. Taped to the reception desk is an A4 flyer entitled We Need Your Bed, appealing for accommodation needed by visiting activists. The first person I meet is 20-year-old Sarah Harding, a physics undergraduate from Manchester who initially came here for four days, but was so enthralled by what she found that she is still here two weeks later. She talks to me over the loud click-clack of printing machines, and the chatter of around 40 campaigners, working the phones – as befits an operation located on a trading estate, this is truly industrial electioneering. The Lib Dems, of course, are more dug in here than just about anywhere else in the country. The constituency contains 40 of the 44 seats for Eastleigh borough council, and every last one is Lib Dem-held.

Moreover, it may be some token of the unlikely magic worked by local activists that their grip on power has actually strengthened while their national polling numbers have tumbled. In that sense, the workmanlike aura of their candidate, borough councillor Mike Thornton, may be all part of the point: there is something very defiant and anti-metropolitan about their campaign, and his lack of political stardust fits with its prevailing mood.

What is also striking is the relative shortage in the Lib Dems’ propaganda of big national themes. The contortions of coalition presumably rule them out – so instead, they are going for archetypal Lib Dem pavement politics: endless pushing of the work done by the Borough Council, and such matters of local controversy as traffic bottlenecks and “Conservative gravel pits”.

When we meet, Thornton is canvassing in Eastleigh town centre in the boisterous company of Paddy Ashdown, who will be in charge of the Lib Dems’ national campaign in 2015. The latter is therefore the perfect person to answer an interesting question: if the Lib Dems are going to have the fight of their lives in two years’ time, is Eastleigh an indicator of the tactics they’ll use? By way of going most of the way to answering “yes”, Ashdown extols the wonders of “a local base”and “a hard record of work”. And he goes on: “The truth is, what makes this winnable for us is the fact that we’ve got a candidate who doesn’t have to make promises, because he can stand on his record. That’s really important, and it applies elsewhere as well.”

What of the Rennard affair, and its possible effect on the Lib Dems’ chances? “Would you prefer not to see that? Obviously, you would. But I’ve just been campaigning in the centre of town, and it never came up.”

He then sounds a little more equivocal. “I don’t say it won’t have an effect – it could do. I don’t know what effect that will be. But my guess is, most people round here will be saying, What kind of MP do I want?” And then the L-word, again. “Locally.”

An hour later, I meet the Tories’ Hutchings. door-knocking in West End in the company of the transport secretary, Patrick McLoughlin.

Her campaign has been a synthesis of local themes (though it’s obviously a planning rather than a parliamentary matter, she is opposed to plans for 1,400 new homes on the edge of the verdant village of Botley, lately approved by the Lib Dem council), and such issues as immigration and the EU, seemingly chosen to try and neutralise the threat from Ukip. After three weeks of campaigning, she appears to have passed the point where she can answer questions with much more than awkward boilerplate, but I have to ask: are Diane James and the Farage army a worry?

Her party, she says, has “got a strong case to make on immigration”, “policies on sham marriages and immigration” and the recent cut in the EU budget.

“The thing with Ukip is that a vote for them is actually going to mean a vote for the Liberal Democrat MP [sic] who wants more immigration, and to be part of a federal Europe.”

So she takes Ukip seriously as opponents? Her face flashes with the merest hint of anxiety. “I take everybody seriously as opponents, because … [pause] … on the day it’s going to be the people of Eastleigh who decide who they want.”

For everybody’s sake, it is perhaps time that all this was over. Back in the town centre, having been accosted by the candidate from the National Health Action party, I seek peace and quiet in the obligatory branch of Costa Coffee. One of the two baristas on duty is called Maria, and she has spent the last three weeks serving endless politicians, aides and activists. “Hundreds of them,” she says. “And I’m sick of it.” Like every other local I meet, she mentions cold calls, piles of leaflets, and in-person visits. “I don’t bother answering the door any more,” she says, just as another canvassing team trudges in for coffee. “I can’t be arsed.”

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Can the UK’s ‘toilet circuit’ of small music venues survive? | John Harris

Saturday, February 23rd, 2013

From Coldplay to PJ Harvey, a lot of big British rock acts started out playing tiny pubs and clubs around the UK. But with many of these venues closing, who will keep the rock’n'roll dream alive?

The Bull and Gate in Kentish Town in north London is, in music-business vernacular, a “toilet venue”, where the stage can just about accommodate a four-piece band, and the dressing room contains a solitary grubby mirror. But the term does this place a real disservice, both in terms of the ornate Victorian splendour of the main bar, and in the roll call of names who have played in the 150-capacity back room – among them Coldplay, Pulp, PJ Harvey, Muse, Blur and the Manic Street Preachers.

After three decades of hosting gigs here, the landlord and landlady are selling up and retiring. The Bull and Gate has been bought by the brewery and pub company Young’s, who are apparently set on turning it into a gastropub (”We don’t feel that having a live music offering at the pub alongside our plans to serve food is viable,” went one company statement). The venue’s current music promoters, a four-person outfit called Club Fandango, will stage their last show on 4 May, which will be preceded by a special run of gigs, likely to feature notable alumni of the Bull and Gate, to be titled Play Your Respects. And that will be that: yet another small music venue shutting its doors, adding to a list of closures that extends across the country, and threatens one of British popular culture’s most inspired inventions: the so-called “toilet circuit”, on which no end of hugely successful musicians have taken their first decisive steps.

In London, as with most matters reducible to hard cash, things are not as bad as elsewhere: here, the story is partly about decline, but also a migration of venues to the east of the city, as ongoing gentrification pushes live music out of its old north London stamping grounds. But beyond the M25, things look grim. The national Barfly chain, which had venues in Brighton, Birmingham, Cambridge and Cardiff, closed most of them between 2008 and 2010. Such famous places as Leeds’s Duchess of York, Newport’s TJs and Leicester’s Princess Charlotte have either been converted to new uses or left to fall into disrepair.

Others are surviving, but struggling: the people in charge of the renowned Hull Adelphi have expressed serious doubts about its future, and venues such as the Tunbridge Wells Forum are now staffed by volunteers. Four or five years ago, the music business clung to the idea that even if sales of CDs were being squeezed, people’s appetite for ticketed live events looked to be increasing. That may hold true for bigger venues, but at the bottom of the live hierarchy, a new rule seems to hold sway: if people now expect to get their music for nothing, they increasingly think that the same ought to apply to watching new bands, no matter how promising they might be.

Twenty or so years ago, when I was a young music writer, I spent most of my evenings in these places, keeping myself going on lager and cigarettes, watching endless bands and occasionally finding music worth evangelising about. It’s a life I still miss, when I used to keep the company of some of the people whose drive and enthusiasm still keep the milieu around small venues alive today – people such as Simon Williams, the one-time staff writer at the New Musical Express who went on to found esteemed independent record label Fierce Panda, before also extending his activities into gig promotion and eventually rooting Club Fandango at the Bull and Gate.

Sitting in an alcove in the pub’s main room, Williams and his business partner Andy Macleod briefly rhapsodise about triumphant Bull and Gate moments (when Coldplay played here in April 1999, says Williams, the queue extended down Kentish Town Road, and they were “just too good”). They also talk me through the events of the last few years: their attempts to buy the Bull and Gate to use as a venue and company HQ, and a quest to secure sponsorship which included a pitch to the makers of an iconic energy drink built on the rebranding of the place as the Red Bull and Gate: “We said to them, ‘You can just paint it, like you do with Formula 1 cars – it’s the greatest tag-line of all time.’”

They have now found a new venue in Dalston, but the imminent closure of the Bull and Gate evidently still hurts. “It’ll be appalling when it actually goes,” says Williams. “I’ve been coming here since 1986, when I was doing a fanzine. That’s a long time. We’re absurdly romantic about this place, and absurdly loyal.”

“Once it becomes a gastropub, that’s final, isn’t it?” says Macleod. “That 33 years of musical heritage just disappears. It’ll all feel really sad.”

The squeeze affecting small venues, they tell me, is down to a tangle of factors: among them, the transformation of urban neighbourhoods such as Kentish Town, the rise of free gigs where the band get a cut of the bar takings, and a music industry that now gets involved with up-and-coming acts at an absurdly early stage. “There’s no money in new bands, we all know that,” says Williams. “But now, with the hyper-speed of things in the music industry, you get in touch with a band who might be doing their first gig, and it’ll be, ‘Talk to our manager, who’s got to talk to the lawyer and the agent.’”

Purely to be seen to be doing their job, they tell me, a band’s representatives might now demand a guaranteed fee of anything up to £75. When the costs of a night at the Bull & Gate come in at least £200 before any musicians have been paid, that threatens the whole viability of the enterprise, not least when every promoter fears the turnout music industry lore knows as “two men and a dog”.

Tonight’s bands draw a combined crowd of around 40. First on are an unremarkable-looking quartet called Civil Love, who play a surprisingly accomplished version of the melodic genre some call power-pop. Next are Evil Alien, a part-electronic band from Birmingham who have driven down to play their first London show, pulling in talent scouts from record companies and a smattering of curious booking agents. Last, bless them, are a White Stripes-esque duo called I Like the GoGo, who send me running from the room with their somewhat irreverent treatment of the Dexys Midnight Runners’ song Geno.

Back at the bar, I talk to the Bull and Gate’s landlord, 70-year-old Pat Lynskey, who speaks with the wry detachment of a man who has seen a few generations of musicians and drinkers come and go, and will soon be spending his first summer in over three decades well away from beer taps and time bells. “I think in the last five years, technology has not been good to us,” he says. “Prior to that, people had to come and see what was on, and they’d stay for the night. Now, they can check everything on their phone before they leave. And if they don’t like it, they won’t come.”

History records that the Manic Street Preachers played at the Bull and Gate on 17 October 1990, when they had just put out an almost-ignored record titled New Art Riot, and were trying desperately to get the attention of the weekly music papers, and again on 17 July of the same year, in even less auspicious circumstances.

“We were on after this really weird folk band, who were Russian or Ukrainian, I think,” says their bass player and lyric writer Nicky Wire. “We walked on stage, and the first thing I said was, ‘Fuck me – no wonder so many Russians kill themselves’, to a very bemused audience. We did about five or six songs. It was a bit of a thrill to play there, because it was always on [1980s and 90s TV staples] Rapido and Snub TV. It did feel like a really good gig to do.”

He recalls the shabbiness of the kind of places the Manics once played, but also the romance they embodied. “There was definitely a ragged glory to it. You felt you were treading the boards of heroes, because nearly everyone we loved had done the same thing.” He mentions vividly remembered gigs at the Leeds Duchess of York, the long-gone Buzz Club in Aldershot, and Southampton Joiners, where the boss of the Columbia record label paid the band a visit, and their career-securing contract was thereby confirmed.

The 200-capacity Joiners is now battling to survive, which leads me to pay a visit the night after my trip to Kentish Town. Having never been there before, I’m thrilled to find a toilet venue par excellence: a bar whose furnishings extend to two apparently paleolithic sofas, a disused subterranean dressing room – flood-damaged, it seems – covered in graffiti left by visiting musicians (”Razorlight – I want to torture you slowly and let you die in a lot of pain”), and an abiding sense of everything being held together by simple goodwill.

“The chances of us closing are massive,” says the venue’s manager, the imposing but genial Patrick Muldowney. “Every Monday morning, we see what bills we can pay – and some weeks, we don’t have enough money, simple as that.” Recent benefit concerts by the Vaccines (toilet circuit graduates who will soon play the 20,000-capacity O2 arena in London) and the singer-songwriter Frank Turner have brought in much-needed funds. But times are unendingly tough: whereas he could once depend on even local bands drawing in at least 30 paying customers, Muldowney says the figure is now closer to 10. “It’s a two-thirds drop-off,” he says, with a grimace. “So it’s massive.”

As in London, Southampton now sees regular free gigs in standard-issue bars and pubs that are financed by sales of drinks, something made easier by a recent legislative change that got rid of any need for an official music license for venues that hold up to 200 people. For the Joiners, that kind of event is pretty much impossible: it has an over-14 license for its music room (an integral part, says Muldowney, of its ethos), and a much more thrifty culture. “The difference between us and a pub is that 50% of our crowd won’t buy a drink all evening,” he says; the Joiners’ head band booker, Ricky Bates, also points out that whereas lesser venues will offer little better than a “karaoke PA”, the Joiners prides itself on an estimable sound system, but it needs a paid engineer to work it.

Tonight’s headliners are the History of Apple Pie, who play indie-rock built on a mixture of sweetness and noise, and are at the end of a 19-date tour punctuated by nights spent at Travelodges and the odd recuperative stay at parents’ houses scattered around the country. Before them, I watch a local trio called Imperatrix, who are bedevilled by colds and flu, and by the fact that their drummer learned their songs a mere 12 hours before. They deliver a performance full of very familiar ingredients: brief flashes of promise, gauche repartee and the sense that with enough visits to venues like this, they might just discover who they actually are.

On my way out, I’m given a Joiners T-shirt, covered in an A-to-Z of the bands who have played here – from the Arctic Monkeys to the Zutons. Next to the door is a list of forthcoming attractions, featuring names that instantly convey the mixture of bravado and creativity that often courses around places like this: the Dead Lay Waiting, Our Lost Infantry, Burglars of the Heart. And a potent thought once again hits home: what a profound pity it would be if the toilet circuit was allowed to rot away – leaving endless free music and ad hoc gigs, but no dependable means via which musicians can been transported away from their home turf, towards something bigger.

“It gets under your skin, doesn’t it?” says Muldowney, by way of a goodbye. “You fall in love with places like this.” Counting in a steady stream of people at the door, he looks firmly in his element, though he views the future with an uneasy mixture of hope and uncertainty. “I’m an eternal optimist,” he says. “We’ll certainly be here in a year.”

UK toilet circuit landmarks past and present

1 Leicester Charlotte (formerly Princess Charlotte; capacity: 200)

Hosted Oasis, the Libertines, Muse et al, but closed in March 2010, to be developed into student flats.

2 Newport TJs (capacity: 350)

A legendary venue where, in December 1991, Kurt Cobain is said to have proposed to Courtney Love. Closed in 2010, and has fallen into disrepair.

3 Cardiff Barfly (capacity: 200)

Part of a chain of small venues that hit the buffers between 2008 and 2010. Hosted future US stars Kings of Leon on their first UK tour.

4 Leeds Duchess of York (capacity: 200 officially, 300 on a good night)

Put on gigs in its cramped back room by such future stars as Nirvana, Coldplay and Pulp. Now a branch of menswear giant Hugo Boss.

5 Manchester Roadhouse (capacity: 200)

Still in business. The entire membership of future Mercury Prize-winners Elbow have worked here; singer Guy Garvey was once the barman.

6 Hull Adelphi (capacity: 200)

In a former housing terrace. Has struggled to survive, but will, with luck, celebrate its 30th anniversary in 2014.

7 Glasgow King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut (capacity: 300)

A survivor, and one-time platform for such future stars as Florence and the Machine and the Killers. Famously where Creation records boss Alan McGee first saw Oasis in May 1993.

8 Southampton Joiners (capacity: 150)

Now fighting the prospect of closure; current indie stars the Vaccines recently played a benefit show. Local legend claims that Jimi Hendrix played here en route to the Isle of Wight festival in 1970.

9 Oxford Jericho Tavern (capacity: 180)

A heartwarming story: after a spell as part of the student-oriented pub chain Scream, reopened as a music venue in 2005. It was once a home from home for Radiohead.

10 Tunbridge Wells Forum (capacity: 250)

The toilet venue that was once a (public) toilet. Still in business, 20 years old, and staffed by volunteers.

11 London Kentish Town Bull & Gate (capacity: 150)

One of the most renowned toilet venues, and now set for closure. Has hosted Blur, Manic Street Preachers, Muse, Coldplay and hundreds more. Set to become – why, of course – a gastropub.

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No more excuses. The only defensible option is to go vegetarian | John Harris

Monday, February 18th, 2013

As the horsemeat scandal demonstrates, the global meat industry destroys the planet and leads to animal cruelty. If you care, there’s only one thing for it …

Scores of questions, but no satisfactory answers. Did British ministers really know back in 2011 that horsemeat had entered domestic food supplies? Might the scandal now include donkeys? And what exactly was the role of an almost comically shadowy set-up called Draap Trading Ltd, which is owned by a trust registered in the British Virgin Islands?

While we’re on the subject of the more light-footed aspects of modern capitalism, what of the fact that Findus – caught with horse flesh in its lasagne, and revealed to have outsourced the making of its Crispy Pancakes to the now-notorious French firm Comigel – is part-owned by a private-equity outfit commanded by one Lyndon Lea, a polo-playing gadfly once famed for a party in Montecito, California, where sushi was reportedly served on the bodies of half-naked women?

Accounts of his company’s role in the recent Findus story are full of phrases such as “extensive cost-cutting”, the sour tang of class and echoes of a lyric once sung by a long-lost indie rock band who went under the wonderfully apt name World Domination Enterprises: “Don’t feel sick, cos someone’s got to eat it.”

As the scandal goes on, that very British sensitivity whereby cows and pigs can be killed and hacked to pieces, but no one must touch horses – or dogs – remains as curious as ever. No one has died, or even fallen ill; the possible entry of the veterinary drug bute into the scandal still looks likely to be a mildly worrying detail rather than the basis of any reasonable cause for mass panic. As far as I am aware, as the meat industry has grown both increasingly complex and ever-more unregulated, precious few of the voices now screaming about its excesses have ever sought to prise open its doors, question whether cutting back on inspection and regulation was such a great idea or wonder whether modern meat-eating might be leading us somewhere grim.

Nonetheless, something interesting is going on, as proved by a run of newspaper front pages. Last Thursday, for example, the Daily Mirror’s headline was “the horse butchers”, and the picture showed an anxious-looking man, seemingly cutting every last half-edible morsel from a chunk of flesh and bone. As with so much of the coverage of the current scandal, its visceral impact was not about whether the meat in question was from horses or cows, but the simple reality of the industrialised processes whereby sentient creatures are turned into what one former abattoir worker recently described in the Financial Times as “a block of frozen mush that’s maybe 2ft by 2ft by 3ft”. In an age when most people buy their meat from supermarkets and have rarely glimpsed a carcass, this points up one of 21st-century living’s most messed-up aspects: the fact that most people eat meat, but recoil when they see what it entails.

At which point, an admission: I am a vegetarian, and I have not (knowingly) eaten meat since the mid-1980s. I stopped for two reasons: the simple realisation that I found killing animals for food objectionable, and a vague mess of thoughts bound up with what it was to be an archetypal 80s lefty. In the years since, I have barely uttered a word about it, mindful of the pieties that led George Orwell to malign certain people as “vegetarians and communists”, and convinced that there are much more important things to shout about.

The clincher was the night I spent at the official Linda McCartney tribute concert at the Albert Hall, when the walls were covered in adverts for her less-than-interesting frozen foods – just relaunched, which is some feat of timing – and the musicians onstage exhorted everyone present to “go veggie”. I cannot quite unpick what did my head in about this: something to do with a misplaced sense of priorities, coupled with a small “p” politics that seemed a little too twee and self-regarding.

But over the last decade or so, the case for vegetarianism has grown ever-more urgent, and unanswerable. A watershed came in 2008, when Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the UN’s intergovernmental panel on climate change, highlighted the links between meat consumption and environmental crisis, and advised anyone listening to “give up meat for one day [a week] initially, and decrease it from there.” Now as then, the meat industry accounts for around a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions, and is directly responsible for huge levels of deforestation. When it comes to wider arguments about sustainability, the arguments are just as stark. Sixteen years ago, a Cornell University study established that 800 million people could be fed with the grain used to fatten up US livestock; the majority of corn and soy grown in the world is now set aside for cattle, pigs and chickens.

Such is the rising noise focused on the meat industry: on the one hand, level-headed arguments about the future of the planet; and on the other, periodic spasms of outrage – as last happened in 2010, when the campaign group Animal Aid revealed the stomach-turning brutality that seemed to be routine at many English slaughter houses, a story which included one abattoir certified for the “humane slaughter” of organically reared cows, sheep and pigs.

But the horsemeat scandal is probably the first big story that joins the two elements together. Ever-rising food costs are what pushed retailers and manufacturers to source questionable meat, so as to keep prices low. Costs are going up partly because of increasing worldwide meat consumption, particularly in China and India, which pushes up the price not just of meat, but the foodstuffs used for livestock. The worldwide meat economy, then, is looking increasingly unaffordable – both financially and environmentally. And the upshot is obvious enough: if the world is going to eat ever-increasing quantities of meat, a lot of it will originate in places where rules are not respected, where animals are routinely brutalised and where what exactly is in those frozen blocks of mush is anyone’s guess.

So, you cannot be a “flexitarian”, and throw a couple of quorn products into your trolley and pretend that that makes everything OK.

Even if you have the money to buy organic meat at your local independent butcher, you will still collide with a couple of inescapable facts: that, as the Animal Aid revelations proved, organic butchery is no guarantee of ethical standards, and that getting our nutrition from meat-eating is unsustainably inefficient. If the personal is political, the only defensible option is to “go veggie”. There: said it.

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